NSA begs courts for 6-month reboot of phone-snooping programs

The Obama administration will ask federal courts to restart the spy programs which were shut down when controversial sections of the Patriot Act expired on Sunday. The USA Freedom Act allows the surveillance to continue for six more months, officials say.

House Resolution 2048, also known as the USA Freedom Act, was
drafted months before a federal court in New York ruled that
Section 215 of the Patriot Act was illegal. The new law
envisioned a 180-day period grace period during which the
National Security Agency could wind down the program collecting
the bulk “metadata” of Americans’ telephone calls, while shifting
the responsibility for collecting the records onto telephone
companies.

However, the NSA shut down the program on Sunday evening as
Section 215 expired before the Senate approved the Freedom Act,
thanks to procedural maneuvers by a group of lawmakers led by
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. The Senate eventually passed the law
in its House-approved form on Tuesday afternoon, and it was
almost immediately signed into law by President Barack Obama.

Citing the Freedom Act’s provision for a six-month transition
period, the government is now arguing that the NSA needs to
restart the bulk collection program in order to end it.

The Obama admin will ask FISC for approval to restart the NSA
bulk phone logs program for the 180 period envisioned by USA
Freedom, I'm told

“We are taking the appropriate steps to obtain a court order
reauthorizing the program,” Marc Raimondi, national security
spokesman for the US Department of Justice, told the Guardian on
Wednesday. “If such an order is granted, we’ll make an
appropriate announcement at that time.”

“I see no reason for the executive branch to restart bulk
collection, even for a few months, and I urge them not to attempt
to do so,” said Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), member of the Senate
Intelligence Committee and one of the Senators who crossed the
aisle to work with Paul against the Patriot Act extension.

“This illegal dragnet surveillance violated Americans’ rights
for 14 years without making our country any safer, and the
administration should leave it on the ash heap of history,”
Wyden told the Guardian.

The administration’s eagerness to exploit the loophole in the
Freedom Act appears to vindicate the critics who have argued the
bill represented a modest reform of NSA surveillance at best.

Though it contains some “modest reform provisions,” the
Freedom Act “does absolutely nothing to restrain the vast
majority of the intrusive surveillance revealed by
Snowden,”wrote Dan Froomkin at The Intercept.

According to Trevor Timm of the Freedom of
the Press Foundation, the bill’s provisions are “vague and
confusing, leading many legal experts to believe they could be
re-interpreted in secret by NSA lawyers with a history of warping
the common definitions of ordinary words beyond
recognition.” As a result, the FISA court could allow the
NSA to continue collecting Americans’ data in secret, added Timm.

Whoops! Obama forgot to thank Snowden in his statement claiming
he's been calling for NSA reform for years pic.twitter.com/pliSGCqqdY

Meanwhile, the chief technologist for the American Civil
Liberties Union, Chris Soghoian, is concerned that the debate
focusing on Section 215 ignored other spying programs the NSA
cared about far more.

“We have allowed this debate to be framed solely around, or
constrained solely around, the program that the intelligence
community doesn’t really [care] about and is willing to have it
be sacrificed as a pawn to protect the other things,”
Soghoian told Just Security. “And we’ve played into
their hands. We played into that trap completely.”